Collective Iranian Culturebase

* Panorama *

پانوراما

A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "sight"), is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images or a three-dimensional model. The word was originally coined in the 18th century by the Irish painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh and London. The motion-picture term panning is derived from panorama.

A panoramic view is also proposed for multi-media, cross-scale applications to outline overview (from a distance) along and across repositories. This so-called "cognitive panorama" is a panoramic view over, and a combination of, cognitive spaces. Used to give a small shot of a wide area.

Contents

1 Paintings

2 Photographs

3 See also

4 References

5 Further reading

6 External links

Paintings

In the mid-19th century, panoramic paintings and models became a very popular way to represent landscapes and historical events. Audiences of Europe in this period were thrilled by the aspect of illusion, immersed in a winding 360 degree panorama and given the impression of standing in a new environment. The panorama was a 360-degree visual medium patented by the artist Robert Barker in 1787. He created a picture spectacle, shown on a cylindrical surface and viewed from the inside, giving viewers a vantage point encompassing the entire circle of the horizon, rendering the original scene with high fidelity. The inaugural exhibition, a "View of Edinburgh", was first shown in that city in 1788, then transported to London in 1789. By 1793, Barker had built "The Panorama" rotunda at the center of London''s entertainment district in Leicester Square, where it remained until closed in 1863.

A panorama of London by Robert Barker, 1792

Large scale installations enhance the illusion for an audience of being surrounded with a real landscape. The Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne, Switzerland was created by Edouard Castres in 1881. The painting measures about 10 metres in height with a circumference of 112 meters. In the same year of 1881, the Dutch marine painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag created and established the Panorama Mesdag of The Hague, Netherlands,a cylindrical painting more than 14 metres high and roughly 40 meters in diameter (120 meters in circumference). In the United States of America is the Atlanta Cyclorama, depicting the Civil War Battle of Atlanta. It was first displayed in 1887, and is 42 feet high by 358 feet circumference (13 x 109 metres). Also on a gigantic scale, and still extant, is the Racławice Panorama (1893) located in Wrocław, Poland, which measures 15 x 120 metres.

Photographs360 degree panorama picture of the center courtyard of the Sony Center at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. This picture was calculated from 126 individual photos using autostitch

Panoramic photography soon came to displace painting as the most common method for creating wide views. Not long after the introduction of the Daguerreotype in 1839, photographers began assembling multiple images of a view into a single wide image. In the late 19th century, panoramic cameras using curved film holders employed clockwork drives to scan a line image in an arc to create an image over almost 180 degrees. Digital photography of the late twentieth century greatly simplified this assembly process, which is now known as image stitching. Such stitched images may even be fashioned into forms of virtual reality movies, using technologies such as Apple Inc.''s QuickTime VR, Flash, Java, or even JavaScript. A rotating line camera such as the Panoscan allows the capture of high resolution panoramic images and eliminates the need for image stitching, but immersive "spherical" panorama movies (that incorporate a full 180° vertical viewing angle as well as 360° around) must be made by stitching multiple images. Stitching images together can be used to create extremely high resolution gigapixel panoramic images.

Panoramic view of the antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array under the clear sky over the Chajnantor Plateau, in the Chilean Andes.

On rare occasions, 360° panoramic movies have been constructed for specially designed display spaces—typically at theme parks, world''s fairs, and museums. Starting in 1955, Disney has created 360° theaters for its parks and the Swiss Transport Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, features a theatre that is a large cylindrical space with an arrangement of screens whose bottom is several metres above the floor. Panoramic systems that are less than 360° around also exist. For example, Cinerama used a curved screen and IMAX Dome / OMNIMAX movies are projected on a dome above the spectators.

One final form of panoramic representation is digital mapping generated from SRTM data. In these diagrams, a computer calculates the panorama from a given point.